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the ice storm cometh

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As far as I can tell, we’re as prepared as we can be for the ice storm expected to hit the DC area any minute now. It’s supposed to rain and freeze all night, and I fully expect to wake up to a house without power. Our town is full of trees: lots of beautiful old trees growing under, over, on and around power lines. When we moved in last spring, one of our neighbors told us that anytime there’s weather in this region that causes power outages, it’s pretty much guaranteed that our town will be out.

So, we’re expecting to deal with that tomorrow, although I’m prepared to be pleasantly surprised. The best case scenario would be if we had power and yet the federal government was closed, but I’m not holding my breath for that one.

At any rate, we have food, we have water, we have batteries, flashlights, candles, matches, two snow shovels, fire starter sticks (but no firewood; I’m hoping to rely on neighbors if that becomes necessary), a battery-powered radio, and a carton of rice milk. The biggest challenge will be getting coffee; I’m hoping it won’t come to making it with hot water from the tap (our water heater runs on gas). But if that’s what I have to do, that’s what I have to do.

the ice storm cometh

too many cops for one block, literally

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Block full of cops.

Today I returned, at 4:30pm, from running an errand to discover police cars zooming through my neighborhood, sirens blaring. I figured there had been an accident on the main road (there was, more on this in a minute), but as I turned onto my (dead-end) block, I only got halfway to my house before three cop cars were piled up at the intersection behind me. Cops jumped out to stop, question, handcuff, and plunk in the back of one of the (now four) Hyattsville PD cruisers, a kid who had been just minutes before walking down the other side of the street talking on his cell phone.

By the time I got to my house (in the middle of the block), four more cruisers had zoomed down to the cul de sac (P.G. County, Maryland / National Capitol Park Police, Riverdale Park, and our own University Park unit), and had two more people sitting on the sidewalk. They were shortly joined by four more Riverdale Park cars (2 of them canine units, leading me to believe they were looking for dealers in the park at the end of our block) and our town police chief (arriving in a plain white sedan). At this point, the 11 cop cars from 5 jurisdictions (something I got used to seeing in DC, but didn’t expect to find out here in the ‘burbs) were completely filling the street, sandwiched in around the handful of resident cars parked on the block.

The cops didn’t seem to be doing much more than milling around; no guns were out, no megaphones were squawking, no hordes of people were being frog-marched from the park. So, I made myself dinner, and when I looked outside again around 5:05pm, there had appeared in front of my house an ambulance (thank you, Hyattsville volunteer FD), a tow-truck pulling a smashed car, and an also-smashed black pickup truck. Bearing in mind that I live on a dead-end street, I was at this point dying to know what the heck was going on, and also convinced that no one would believe me unless I documented the scene (which I did, although only on film, as my digital camera is still broken; otherwise, I’d be sharing the photos now). Once outside, I finally got the story from a guy walking back up the block, who was not a cop, and who seemed only too happy to tell me what was going on.

What was going on: a car had been jacked (I’m guessing in the park over in Riverdale, since the park police were the jurisdiction farthest from us), driven away with the owner still inside (through Riverdale Park and Hyattsville, no doubt ‘at high speed’), and had slammed into another car (at the major intersection on the corner of our town, 2 blocks away from my house), driving that car up onto the side of the road (most likely the smashee being the car on the tow truck, and the smasher being the black pickup).

The carjackers then made the strategic error of turning into our town in an attempt to get away. Any taxi driver who’s dropped off in here, or any college student trying to get back to campus from Target, could have told them this was a doomed choice. Finding themselves in a morass of dead-end blocks, they ditched the car a couple of blocks down from ours (leaving the owner with it), and ‘fled on foot’ through the park, ending up at the end of our block where they were stopped and held until the owners of the two cars could come over and identify them. The guy who told me all this was the husband of the woman in the smashed car, who lives on the block behind us (more data to support the assertion that most accidents happen within a mile of home, as she was only 2 blocks from her house when she was run off the road). By 5:20pm, all the cop cars had driven off (one by one, carefully extricating themselves from the wedge formation they had created on the block).

My timing couldn’t have been better on this, in terms of getting to see most of the action but not getting hit by either carjackers or police officers zooming around my block like maniacs. When I passed the intersection, I figured there had been an accident as I saw a car at the side of the road (the smashee, as it turns out) and a cop car with lights flashing. Not 10 minutes later, there was the full pile-up on our street.

I can’t wait to read the write-up for this in next month’s town newsletter.

too many cops for one block, literally

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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This past Wednesday we saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Kennedy Center, with Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin, who won a Tony for his performance in 2005. I’ve always been curious about this play, and rented the film last month, but returned it only half-watched so as not to entirely spoil the dialogue (a choice I’m glad I made, although I might rent it again after having seen the play).

The acting was—as expected—superb, so well done that we felt trapped in the midst of an awful home drama during the second and third acts. Which, as you might imagine, wasn’t the most pleasant or fun experience of a play, but it certainly was one we could appreciate. I knew going into the evening that the play is not an uplifting one, despite having a certain dark humor that someone who’s spent many years on college campuses can readily relate to. It was, in some ways, comparable to watching Bent: it’s a wonderful film (and presumably a wonderful play as well), everyone should see it, but you hardly walk away feeling ‘good’ at the end. Of course, I don’t at all mean to diminish the power of works about the Holocaust with this tangential comparison; the experience of readying yourself to approach what you know will be artistically worthwhile but personally difficult was strikingly similar.

At any rate, there’s not much more to say about the performance beyond that. It was excellent, the actors were excellent, the play is deserving of its reputation, and despite having two well known and easily recognizable film actors on the stage, their performances were so good that we completely ceased to think of them as anyone other than George and Martha.

So there you have it.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

BMC bookshop

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Today will be my first day of volunteering at the BMC bookshop here in town. The store is a non-profit organization, run by volunteers, with the income generated going toward scholarships to my alma mater. You can imagine that a used bookshop is not in the position to provide full funding to students, but every little bit counts, and it’s a neat set-up. All of the books are acquired through donation, and the shop is run by volunteers.

I anticipate that, as the youngest weekday volunteer by at least 20 years, I will be doing a lot of lifting and carrying. I am looking forward to getting back to regular bookstore work as well. Alphabetizing is, I’ve found, a much more satisfying activity than exam grading (for example).

To get to the shop from my house, I’ll need to branch out and take a Metro bus. I could, I suppose, just take two trains and walk an extra mile and a bit. But, the weather forecast includes 25 to 35 mph winds today, so I’m thinking that the bus is a better option. There are two buses I could take: one that is more geographically direct, but requires me to walk about 1/2 mile once I get off the metro, or one that is more geographically distant, but picks up right outside the metro stop. I think I will try the latter this morning, and the first this afternoon, when I will be starting to hit rush hour traffic and the time spent walking will likely equal the extra time sitting in traffic. I have my schedules printed out and ready to go in my bag, and if I just don’t forget to bring change and get a bus transfer, I’ll be good to go.

In keeping with the buying part of my book challenge, I am going to endeavor to convince myself that books from a used bookstore count as ‘new,’ and not end up bringing things home from the shop every week. I slid a bit at Powell’s, and bought some used poetry books, but I’m back on the wagon. I swear.

BMC bookshop